Year In Review – Baxleys.org

Happy New Year 2014!

Greetings from the Baxley Clan! Here’s a recap of what is happening in our peaceful, country setting (we like to pretend it’s peaceful anyway!)

Patrick

We’ll start with Patrick who is 3 as of last March. He’s still the baby of the family and is loved by all of us, even when he destroys his brothers’ Lego
masterpieces. He gets to go to preschool 2 mornings a week where he loves to play with his friend, Lincoln, and eat snacks. Patrick has two speeds, full speed and complete stop; and he goes from sun-up to sun-down and runs everywhere he can. He especially loves puzzles and will unexpectedly stop for hours and work on puzzles and he always has time to stop and read books with mom & dad. Curious George TV show and books are his favorites right now.

Dominic

Next up the line is Dominic who turned 5 in September. He goes to preschool three mornings a week where he says he also likes to play with his friend, Carson, and eat snacks. As you can tell, the preschool curriculum is pretty rigorous. He is just starting to read and is really getting excited about the prospect of staying up 30 minutes later at night to read with the big kids. Dominic follows in the footsteps of his father and is attracted to anything electronic and has a particular fondness for the iPad. He’s just starting to get interested in LEGOs too. Unlike Patrick, Dominic does not have a fondness for running or doing anything dangerous. Needless to say our two younger boys couldn’t be more different from each other but usually they get along like peas in a pod. Lucky for them because they share a room!

Molly

Molly turned 7 in October and is now in the 1st grade! Molly is our tomboy and can hold her own with her brothers, but also loves to play with her dolls for hours. Lately she’s been tapping into her creative side and is really interested in doing more crafty things, which is nice because usually she just doesn’t want to stop moving! Her favorite subject in school is art class and she says she is disappointed they only get to have art class once a week.

Calvin

Calvin, 8 as of last March, is in 3rd grade and well…he’s our Calvin! He says his favorite subject in school is recess. His teacher says he always makes her smile. His current interests include anything medieval including castles, knights, swords, etc. If the weather is nice he can usually be found making a fort somewhere in the yard out of some junk he found in the barn. If the weather is not so nice, he has the living room set up as a fort and is fighting off his sisters with a laid-out tactical plan. True to his name he loves the Calvin & Hobbes books and even made a two-headed snow goon after our first good snow this year. Calvin also made his first communion back in May!

Marie

Marie turned 10 on the 10th of October, her golden birthday! She’s in the 4th grade this year and loving every minute of being in the same class as her best friends. Her favorite subject is also art. Marie is our very girly girl and LOVES horses. Did we mention she loves horses? Each summer we let the kids choose an activity, they usually choose something like baseball , and every summer Marie chooses something to do with horses. She is currently saving her allowance and extra money so she can buy her own horse. We have given her the go-ahead to get her own horse only if she can buy and then pay for the upkeep of the horse each month. At this point we’re not too worried we’ll have to give up an acre of our yard for a horse any too soon. Marie is an avid reader and currently is third in her school for reading points; most of the time the books she’s reading are about horses!

Noah

Noah is now 12! It is very hard for us to believe that our oldest baby turned 12 in October! Where does the time go?! He’s now in the 6th grade at the Jr. High. At this point the teachers expect the kids to be more organized and more responsible … this seems to be something he is still working on but overall he’s a great student. He says his favorite subject is math. Noah is playing trombone in the school band and starting in the second semester he’ll be playing tuba … just like his dad used to do. He is also in the choir and show choir. Noah is also playing 6th grade basketball and he is really improving his skills as a forward. The coach has described his rebounding as Rodmanesque. He is also another electronics fan like his father and is learning to do some computer programming and wants to “hack.”

Nate

As for Nate & Sharon: we’re in survival mode! Nate is still working at the University of Illinois in the LAS College managing the online learning programming team. Right now his office is in the newly renovated Lincoln Hall but he’ll be moving over to the English building soon. In his spare time he’s busy digging up our septic tank, doing multiple house repairs, and various honey-do tasks. If there is any time left he still enjoys programming and woodworking. Since Noah started playing trombone, Nate has also started playing his trombone again! Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can get a duet out of the two of them on special occasions.

Sharon

Sharon is obviously keeping busy being mom making sure everyone is organized, fed, and where they need to be. This year we moved and enlarged the garden. The garden did great and provided us with plenty of produce for her to experiment with canning for the first time. We now have plenty of canned tomatoes, peaches, applesauce and applebutter in the pantry. She’s already mapping and planning the 2014 garden! Other new things include learning to knit & crochet, which is a slow process due to the little time she gets to sit down to learn which usually results in her falling asleep in the recliner! Maybe by this time next year she’ll be able to knit a scarf or something simple at this rate 🙂 She’s still involved helping coordinate our church’s moms’ group and volunteering at the food pantry .

As for stuff we did in the past year…we honestly can’t remember what we did 2 days ago! I had to go back through the pictures on my phone and the calendar to recall what happened! We did our first summer camping/blueberry picking/beach trip in July and all went very smooth! We enjoyed every minute of camping out in nature and picking loads of blueberries and meeting good friends at the beach in Michigan. Noah and Marie attended Camp Ondessonk for a week back in July. The older boys both played summer baseball and the girls experimented with a summer tumbling class. We managed to squeeze in a day trip over to Turkey Run on a beautiful September Saturday. We adopted our new dog, Star, (as our old dog, Brownie, died last year) in the Fall and varied our number of barn cats from 20 down to our current number of 2. We still have just the one rabbit, Lilly.

Current happenings: Noah, Marie, and Calvin are all still involved in our local 4-H club and are now getting excited to start this year’s projects! Right now we’re enjoying our two week Christmas vacation with everyone home, including Nate, to go visit family and get some stuff done around the house like renovating the mudroom (an ongoing project.) The kids go back to school on January 6 and Nate heads back to work too. Then we’ll fall back into the routine of school and activity schedules for all the kids. Everyone is very healthy and strong and the kids are doing great academically in school. We are certainly very blessed with what God has given us!

Merry Christmas from the Baxleys and we pray that you all have a blessed 2014!

Nate & Sharon

Noah, Marie, Calvin, Molly, Dominic & Patrick

Happy Advent 2012…Merry Christmas…Prayerful Lent…Happy Easter 2013…Whoa…it’s Christmas 2014!!

Another year flies by again in the Baxley household. Here’s the update on what’s going on for those of you who are not on Facebook.

We officially now have 5 kids going to school! All the kids are doing very well and we’re very proud of all of them! Noah, 11, is now in 5th grade and eats like a horse. We have given him the name “bottomless pit” because he constantly grazes and eats whatever, whenever. He started playing basketball this year along with playing trombone in the school band. Marie, 9, is in 3rd grade and talks a mile a minute from sun up to sun down. Her biggest interest is horses and she can tell you all about all about horses. She was able to take riding lessons this past summer and loved every minute of it and since then has been asking us to buy her a horse. We’ll let the grandparents buy her one and keep it at their house. Calvin, 7, now in 2nd grade, is a Lego maniac. When we can’t find him he is either building some extreme contraption out of Legos or outside using his gargantuan imagination playing castle-fortress in the back of the barn. Molly, 6, entered the big world of kindergarten this year! She loves school and even more finally getting to go to school with the big kids and riding that big yellow bus. Dominic, 4, started preschool two mornings a week. When we ask him about his mornings at preschool he always says he likes playing with the toys and eating the snacks. Patrick, also known as Patch to us, is just enjoying being 2. He’s really good at demolishing a neatly organized things.

Just recently Nate changed jobs but he’s still at the University. He is now working full-time for the LAS department and his office is on top floor of Lincoln hall. One of his hobbies this past year was tracing family history. It’s always nice to know that our ancestors were either royalty or horse thieves. Sharon is still going strong at home and in survival mode trying to organize the chaos and put food on the table. She is expanding the garden and even convinced Nate to dig holes on the hottest day of the year to plant 18 new fruit trees in the back yard. Our garden wasn’t super successful with the excessively hot summer we had but she still managed to pack the freezer with tomatoes for some mid-winter salsa marathons. One of her goals for this year is to update this blog weekly so maybe when you check in here from time to time we’ll have new things added.

Here are some photos from the past year. We still feel extremely blessed and grateful for all we have. Drop in sometime and say hello, it’s always slow out here in the country…well as slow as having 6 kids can get!

Nate & Sharon

Noah, Marie, Calvin, Molly, Dominic & Patrick

On top of Mt. Evans in Colorado

Looking out over the Oregon Trail in western Nebraska

Double thumbs up from Molly for Mutton Busting at her first rodeo

Merry Christmas 2011 and Happy 2012!

Salutations from the Baxley family! Another year has flown by faster than ever. 2011 brought us a flurry of activity and some organized chaos. Here’s the annual update on the Baxley clan.

Nate continues his job at the Univ. of Illinois doing what he loves to do, developing websites for the LAS and Education departments. He’s still dabbling in a little woodworking and remains our on-call repair guy for our house plumbing, electrical, septic, and computer repairs. Sharon continues with her domestic goddess duties and mothering 6 children and keeping up the garden and orchard. Here she enslaves the kids with gardening tasks. (insert evil laugh here) No really, some of the kids seem to get into the gardening thing. Whatever goes and gets them to eat healthy. Sharon has plans to add more fruit trees to our orchard in 2012 so we can have a business selling produce when the kids are older and we can use the children as employees. (insert another evil laugh here.)

All the kids are doing great. Noah, 10; Marie, 8; and Calvin, 6, are all doing super in school this year. Molly, 5, is in pre-school a few mornings during the week. Dominic, 3 and Patrick, 21 months, are both hanging at home with mom and keeping her busy with potty training and diapers.

They all still love being outdoors whenever they can get out. The kids are still happy with our mega playset Nate and his dad built and it gets a lot of use. This year the kids themselves added a hay bale pile next to the tire swing and began a game to see how high they could swing from the pile.

We made a few nice improvements on our old farmhouse in September which included more insulation, new siding and new windows. The house doesn’t look too much different on the outside beyond taking the front porch roof off, but we can already tell a difference in the heating bills and there isn’t a breeze blowing through the inside.

Back in June we traded in the minivan for a Chevy 12 passenger van. So any money we’re saving on propane is spent on gas. But really, we do love it and it has lots of space to haul all of our family and extra people too. FYI: the van interior does hold at least 9 bales of straw alongside 6 kids and 2 adults.

In July we took a family vacation down to Camp Ondessonk, a Catholic youth camp in southern Illinois about an hour east of Carbondale. They hold a family camp every summer and entire families can stay there as campers and do all the camp activities. As you can see from some of our pictures we had a super time. Many thanks to our good friend Rebecca Cler and the entire staff at Camp O. We hope to return for more family camps and the kids are now wanting to attend as regular summer campers. HEEPWAH!

Dominic and Molly at Camp O — Dominic & Molly at Camp O

Here’s a few more pictures from our 2011 year. Swimming in the pool out back, the Penfield tractor show and meeting Mr. Lincoln, Patrick’s 1st birthday, a trip to the beach on Lake Michigan with the Norths, and my favorite: Calvin dressed up as a storm trooper holding up Molly with a banana.

Nate with Dominic and Patrick in the pool

Noah, Marie, Calvin, and Molly loved the tractors at Penfield

Marie and Patrick at Camp Ondessonk — Marie and Patrick atCamp Ondessonk

2011 brought lots of fun family times for us. We’re looking forward to 2012 and to more traveling and making memories together. God has truly been watching over us and has blessed us with 6 amazing, healthy, and happy children. We’re always here out in the country, life is quiet and slow (as slow as having 6 kids can get) so please stop in to say hello any time!

Merry Christmas 2010

Merry Christmas! As you can see, once again mom has taken the easy way out. Or I can disguise it as trying to be “green” and save a few trees by doing our Christmas cards electronically this year. Believe what you will.

So, our biggest news of the year…another baby! Patrick Benjamin was born March 29, 2010. He is a happy and healthy baby boy who loves keeping up with the family tradition of early mobility and is almost walking on his own now. Although he recently learned to sleep through the night, so we’re VERY happy with that accomplishment. The picture on the left is of Patrick and Great Grandma Appleby on her birthday. Note the birthday crown on Grandma’s head made by the older kids.

Molly, 4, began her first year of preschool this fall and she totally loves it. Love love loves it. We’ve never seen a little girl who is so strong she can beat up her 9 year old brother but so cute and little she melts your heart. She’s learning fast and enjoys playing outside in the dirt and inside with her dolls. We’re still not sure where she gets her energy but we sure wish we could bottle it! She still likes to dress up as a ballerina too. Not sure how she keeps so warm when our house is 65 degree and she’s running around in a leotard.

At the left you can see our Dominic ready to bite into another apple (yes, he ate lots of apples off our tree.) Yes, he’s already 2 years old! It’s hard to believe our #5 is now in the *terrific* twos! He’s now talking up a storm and growing like a weed. One of his favorite things is John Deere. Every tractor is called a John Deere. Thomas trains come in a close second. He has a fondness for tractors, trains, and books. Needless to say he is the easiest kid to buy presents for.

Marie, 7, started 1st grade this year. She is doing great at school and loves every minute of it. She is still in the business of collecting hippos and is now trying to learn to sew like mom. She’s especially into American Girl dolls and reading. Honestly, I think she’s into just about anything and everything any 7 year old girl could be interested in at that age!

Calvin, 5, began kindergarten this year. He is doing so well with his work and loves every minute of school. He just started reading and is taking off and he’s so proud of himself (and we are too of course!) His current interests are Legos, Legos, and more Legos. Oh, and he likes anything to do with knights and castles too. Early this year we went down to Carbondale to a medieval play castle made just for kids. Calvin loved it. You can usually catch him dressed up in his knight costume running around the house looking for dragons or trying to get one of his sisters thrown into the dungeon.

Last but not least, Noah. He just turned 9 in October and continues to impress us with his eagerness to learn and how fun he can be. The school change was a challenge socially for him at first, but now he has settled in and gets along with all his classmates and is excelling in all his classes. He’s so good with the younger kids and always taking care of the babies and playing with them. Now that Noah and Calvin have their own room complete with a Lego extravaganza, we sometimes don’t see him for 2 or 3 hours because he is usually building some fun contraption that he invented. He is really enjoying 3rd grade and being the entertainer for his class.

Nate is still working at the College of Education at the Univ. of IL and liking it. He has a few side jobs he takes on for fun and recently turned out thelistmaker.com so we can keep up with the gift lists for our family across the globe. Sharon is at home with the brood keeping up with laundry, meals and potty training. We’re both loving having a large family and feel very blessed God entrusted us with 6 beautiful, healthy children.

We hope you have a happy, healthy 2011 and drop us a line or stop in to say hi!

Nate & Sharon
Noah, Marie, Calvin, Molly, Dominic & Patrick

Merry Christmas 2009

Merry Christmas from the Baxleys!

Hello All! Since we’re making a concerted effort to save some trees and time (not to mention money) we’ve decided to just do a “blog Christmas card” for our family this year. Sorry to those relatives and friends who aren’t on the electronic bandwagon but you know us, Nate is always on the cutting edge of technology 🙂

2009. Wow! Where do we begin?
Obviously with the kids, since we have a lot of ’em!

Dominic celebrated his 1st birthday back in September. He has grown so much! Walking, talking, and climbing like a pro, he continues to charm everyone and has a smile and cuddle for everyone. He is such a good sleeper, napper and eater too. We haven’t decided who he looks like yet but reviewing old pictures makes us think he most looks like Noah, especially with the blonde hair and same body build. But he’s developing his own personality and characteristics. This fall his favorite activity was just being outdoors exploring, he’s doing his best to keep up the exploring inside for the winter.

On to our little Molly Kay who turned 3 in October. She’s quite the little gal who loves to play “ballerini” (aka being a ballerina) and is quite active these days. Even though she is petite and tiny, she can sure hold her own against her brothers and boss her big sister around too. She recently had her tonsils/adenoids removed in order to improve her (and her parent’s) sleep habits. It has made a world of difference for her sleeping. She took pretty much a week to recover from the surgery and now she is a back to her old self except that she sleeps though the night and doesn’t fall asleep in odd places/positions during the day. She has a multitude of interests and her favorite thing to do currently is snuggle with mom and dad whenever she can get us one-on-one.

Calvin entered his second year of preschool and is loving every minute of it. He turned 4 back in March. He spends most of his days either at preschool or playing with his little brother and sister. We think he can make a car out of anything as he is really good at role-playing. Right now he can quote almost every line from the movie “Up” after seeing it movie twice and loves Star Wars even though he’s never seen the movies. He constantly goes around breathing and talking like Darth Vader. He’s such a riot (Calvin, not Darth Vader!)

Our princess Marie celebrated her 6th birthday in October with a very girly tea party complete with all her friends and favorite stuffed animals. As most of you know, Marie’s favorite animal is a hippo. For her birthday she received a very large stuffed hippo from mom and dad and now her bed is overflowing with a family of stuffed hippos keeping her company at night. Marie started Kindergarten this year and is doing extremely well in school and loves everything about it. Often she wishes she had more homework like her big brother but we get the feeling she won’t be wishing for that later on 🙂

The hardest thing of all is believing our “baby” Noah is 8 years old and in 2nd grade this year! Wow, how times flies. Noah has turned in to such a great boy and a lot of fun to hang out with. He has a great sense of humor and is a hard worker in school. He is also doing wonderful in school and continues to impress us with his knowledge and eagerness to learn new things. Just lately he has made dad’s day asking to learn how to play Axis and Allies. Nate may just turn Noah into a WW II buff yet 🙂

Our summer went pretty well. One of the major projects was a huge playset for the kids. Here it is from start to (almost) finish. We still have to add the sandbox and a couple of odds and ends next summer but it’s usable now:

Nate and his dad designed and built the whole thing by themselves. The kids are thrilled and so are we now that they have something to climb and swing on. It’s big enough for at least 6 kids and should last for a long time! A huge thanks to Nate’s dad for all his carpentry expertise and help this past summer.

We were able to get away for a little while up to the dunes and Chicago this summer and the kids had a blast. The 3 oldest played baseball in the summer and that made for a really busy month back in June. Nate is still at the UI and really enjoying it. He’s glad to have some extra time in the evenings to work on fun programming and side projects now. Sharon is busy keeping up with the kids and school. She is due with baby #6 in March 2010 so we’re preparing for 6 kids, mentally and physically, trying to figure out where this little guy (we plan to name him Patrick) is going to sleep once he moves out of mom and dad’s room! A house addition is definitely in the plans in the next couple of years! We celebrated our our 12th wedding anniversary on Nov. 22 by going to the German restaurant in Gibson city. We both dream of traveling but reality could only send us to Gibson City so we’ll have to settle for that 🙂 God has certainly blessed us in the past 12 years with beautiful children and a great place to raise them.

We hope this note finds you doing well and looking forward to Christ’s birthday. Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy 2010! We’ll be sure to let you know when our baby Patrick arrives in March!

Nate & Sharon
Noah, Marie, Calvin, Molly, and Dominic